Those who believe that the Orioles will never succeed under [owner Peter] Angelos need to get over it -- the owner is not selling the club. [President of baseball operations Andy] MacPhail has done many good things since taking over in June 2007, particularly in his acquisition of young pitching talent. But he is at least as responsible as Trembley for the team's failings, if not more so.

The reality is that almost everything we said about the Orioles last winter -- that this is a team with plenty of young talent, a team that could well be on the rise -- still holds. If owner Peter Angelos is embarrassed enough by the way the Orioles are playing now to up the current $74 million payroll and hand some real authority to the new manager, this is not a bad job.

Trembley managed in the minors for a long, long time, which upon his hiring was considered (maybe even by me) a good thing. In retrospect, we might wonder why a manager would spend a long, long time in the minors. Don't most great managers force their way into the majors while still relatively young? I'm thinking about Joe McCarthy and Davey Johnson and Earl Weaver and Tony La Russa and Sparky Anderson and Gene Mauch and John McGraw and Joe Torre and ... well, just about everybody. Not to generalize or anything.

The Orioles fired manager Dave Trembley on Friday morning. That job is one of the most impossible in sports, with a ridiculously hard schedule and an impossible owner. But while the Orioles are overmatched in an impossible division, they shouldn't be quite this bad. Interim manager Juan Samuel brings more personality but he looks like the very definition of interim. I hope he gets a chance.

• NBCSports.com's Craig Calcaterra takes a look at a couple of potential candidates for Orioles manager.

Other candidates that get talked up by O's fans are Tom Kelly and Davey Johnson. Not to put too fine a point on it, but those guys are a bit long in the tooth to bring a young team up from nothing anymore, no? And that's even if you assume that either of them want to manage the O's. Davey has a bad history with Peter Angelos and Kelly seems pretty darn comfortable being Twins manager emeritus these days to want to try and figure out what makes Adam Jones tick. If I had a veteran team I wanted to push over the top, sure, I'd consider both of them, but they just aren't the right fit for Baltimore.

• Yahoo Sports' Big League Stew blog says Trembley's dismissal was a long time coming.

Not that I think Baltimore's bungled season is necessarily all Trembley's fault. But you start to expect an early bloodletting at the top when a team starts a season with a 2-16 record en route to sitting 21 games out of first place by the first week of June. The Orioles are currently 15-39, and that's the kind of mark that puts them in the same conversation as the '88 squad.

A former scout and minor-league lifer who never played a day professionally and has a master's degree in education, Trembley was never supposed to be a long-term solution when he took over for Sam Perlozzo in 2007. It was a mild upset even when he returned for the 2010 season. Now, it looks like he was mostly just a fall guy.

"He's the best pitcher in this draft, by far,'' one scout says. Taillon has a 98-mph fastball, superior breaking ball and terrific makeup. The latest in a long line of great young pitchers from Texas ( Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Josh Beckett, etc.)

Roberts' return shouldn't have much of a fantasy impact on anyone outside of his owners. Ty Wigginton will spend most of his time at first base, and the odd man out is most likely Julio Lugo, who doesn't even deserve deep AL-only league consideration at this point.

The current O's, baseball's worst team, are evaporating from our future. That's especially true as the Washington Nationals prepare to take center stage in the baseball world next week. Since the Nats came to town, they've wrestled with the O's for undecided voters, especially in wealthy suburbs in Maryland between the two ballparks. This season has finally done the trick. By the All-Star break, the Nats may be the only logical summer choice for those without masochistic tendencies.